Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
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Monday, May 20, 2013

Right-wing political groups asked for
additional information before IRS recognition of them as tax-exempt-
SCANDAL!

Associated Press phone records secretly
seized by the Department of “Justice:” NOT a scandal. (Yet.)

IRS “targeted” Tea Party groups
requesting tax-exempt status. Actually the IRS subjected them to more
careful vetting than usual, asking for more information, which
delayed the granting of the status. But they're free to operate as
tax-exempt while waiting. [1]

All the establishment media
keeps calling it “targeting.” Yet it turns out that liberal
groups were also subject to delays and lengthy questionnaires. One of
them shut down as a result. I only heard or read one report
about that. If you missed it, you're still being misled to believe
that the right-wing was “targeted.” [2]

Meanwhile the secret rifling through
the phone records of Associated Press employees last year by Eric
Holder's minions at the Department of “Justice” isn't deemed
scandalous. Guess because the Republicans hate the media too. Instead
they're rehashing the Benghazi, Libya, attack last year by Islamists
that killed the U.S. ambassador and some guards. Okay, Obama put out
lies because he was afraid a “terrorist” attack would hurt his
reelection prospects. Too bad the Democrats are incapable of just
saying that. Instead they sent UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who's
close to Obama, to FIVE- count 'em, FIVE- Sunday morning TV political
palaver programs in one day to put out the agreed upon line that a
mob was spontaneously inflamed by a dopey anti-Prophet Muhammed
video, grabbed their AK-47s and RPGs and mortars out of their larders
and expertly assaulted the guarded and fortified U.S. compound. (It
only sounds ridiculous when you include details like that. So leave
out the details! Brilliant plan, Barack!)

Hey, it worked. He got reelected,
didn't he?

So why don't the Democrats just drop
the bullshit and say Obama didn't want to jeopardize his reelection?
I mean, as the inimitable Hillary Clinton says, What difference does
it make?

That is to say, dead is dead.

Oh, that would be “cynical” of
them, I suppose, to just come clean. That is, politicians are
expected to maintain a facade of false at all times, lest their
subjects- excuse me, “We The People,” lose trust in government.
Wouldn't want that to happen, now would we! (Someone must be a bit
out of touch if that's their concern. That horse left the barn a few
years ago.)

One thing is a little sad. The
ambassador who got killed, Christopher Stevens, if we are to believe
the U.S. media accounts, actually was a decent guy. If the U.S. ever
adopted a pro-human foreign policy, people like him would be
important assets. Ironic that the sons of bitches, the John
Negropontes of the world, never get what's coming to them. Instead
it's the good guys who catch the karmic retribution. (That's not an
endorsement of the Islamofascists who in this view are agents of that
karma. I don't actually believe in karma. How about we just call it
“blowback” and leave it at that.)

1] The issue is the particular
tax status being sought by these Tea Party types. A political
organization can have tax-exempt status, but it has to reveal its
donors. These reactionaries seek to hide their donors' identities.
(They should start something called the Bashful Billionaires Club.)
In order to do that, they have to pretend they're “social welfare”
organizations. This is what the mendacious Karl Rove does with
Crossroads America, for example. The real problem with what the IRS
did is that it just went after the small fry, apparently too
politically weak to enforce tax law against blatant violators like
GOP poohbah Rove. After all, Republicans control the House of
Representatives, semi-control the Senate, the corporate media is
mostly pro-GOP, and for that matter the men with the guns, the
military and secret police and regular police, are overwhelmingly
reactionaries and thus Republican- and that's no small thing. Oh, and
most of the large corporate upper hierarchy is Republican.

There's a totally specious argument
that reactionaries have trotted out at times to justify the need to
hide their moneybag donors' identities. They point out that people
who gave to the NAACP back in the 1950s and '60s were risking their
lives. Good argument. Wouldn't want the KKK to kill the Koch
brothers! (Uh, when exactly was the last time that a racist or
fascist killed a rich reactionary? Oh, right, it was never.)

2] Brian Nailer, NPR Weekend
Edition Sunday morning, when no one is listening, 5/19/13. A news
co-op providing stories for the New York Times went out of
business because of dilatory IRS tactics. Without IRS recognition of
their tax-exempt status, they couldn't get necessary foundation
funding to continue. So the only known actual IRS victim in
the story gets ignored because it doesn't fit the “IRS targeted
conservatives” script.

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We now return to
Obama: Cynicism Squared.

Just as it has been revealed that the
Obama regime secretly obtained the phone records- for both the
business and personal phones- of one hundred Associated Press reporters and editors for a two month period last year, allegedly as
part of a “leak investigation,” Obama is making a show of
introducing a reporter's shield law in Congress, which he knows damn
well will be dead on arrival.

Think that's cynical? Wait, there's more!

Obama's bill contains a "national security" exception! So it wouldn't even make the slightest difference in cases like the AP one!

How's that for cynicism!

But Obama wants to con us into thinking he's a First Amendment protector with his "shield law" stunt. (I'd like to see Congress actually pass it, just to see if Obama would veto his own law. Don't laugh, it's possible he would. Remember his backflip on the law to immunize the telecoms for helping the NSA illegally spy on us?)

If Obama is so concerned that the
media be free of government interference (and persecution, for that
matter), he'd do better to practice what he chooses to preach
only at convenient moments. Like his Democratic predecessor Clinton,
he's an slippery con man adept at deceptive feints and verbal
tap-dancing. Much more dangerous than a tongue-tied simpleton like
Bush II, because more complex and better at fooling people. [1]

One of the most
important deleterious effects of this type of repressive activity is
that it intimidates whistle-blowers from going to the media with
information. That is probably the main intent here. This strategy
works in tandem with the Obama regime practice of criminally
persecuting whistle-blowers like Thomas Drake, William Binney, John
Kiriakou, and others. (Complete with FBI terror raids on their homes.
Hyperbole, you say? Imagine being at home with your wife and children
when a dozen or more men in flak vests carrying automatic assault
rifles kick in your door and swarm into your home, screaming commands
at you and your family. Bet your wife and kids would be terrified, if
not you too, tough guy. The terror may not always be achieved, but it
is certainly intended.) [Go to democracynow.org and youtube.com to learn
more about these and other cases.]

Obama's Attorney General, the
professional oppressor Eric Holder, claims that he had nothing to do
with the spying, because he recused himself from the “case,”
oddly. Therefore he played dumb when asked by Congress why his
minions issued a secret subpoena, which prevented the AP from knowing
what was happening and thus being able to challenge the search. [“Due
process” Obama-regime style.] He played dumb on lots of things
during his Congressional appearance, in fact. [2]

Holder is defending this outrageous
spying by saying that in all his years as a lawyer, this is one of
the worst leaks he's ever seen. Naturally, he claimed
that American lives were put at risk by the “leak.” (They always
say that.) He refused to be specific. However...

NPR's secret police tool, Dena
Temple-Raston, yesterday dutifully passed along the story the Obama
regime wanted passed along. (Anonymously- hey a “leak!” Actually
an authorized plant. So presumably they won't be secretly
seizing her phone records. But that's ok, the NSA has the
actual calls, just in case.) [Temple-Raston's current official title
at NPR is “Counterterrorism Correspondent.” That highly
ideological designation tells you quite a lot right there. She's part
of what NPR calls its “national security team.” She- and NPR- are
completely in bed with the secret police and military in their “war
on terror.”]

Supposedly this terrible terrible
leak that endangered all our lives concerned stopping Al-Qaeda from
using- a nuclear weapon! A dirty bomb! A sarin gas plot! Uh, no,
actually it was nothing like that. It was the story about the guy the
CIA (and MI6 and the Saudis, but Temple-Raston didn't mention them)
infiltrated into Al-Qaeda in Yemen, and got ahold of one of their
suicide bombs by posing as a willing suicide dupe. After duly
delivering the bomb to his actual masters, the secret police
apparently couldn't help boasting about their great coup to their
media stooges- or so it seemed to me at the time. If we believe
Holder (and there's no reason on earth to take anything
that man says on his word alone) it wasn't that at all, but some
nefarious leak that was not authorized. (Or maybe both; you see the
two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Some secret policemen
might have decided to boast, and another level or rival organization
might have been miffed by this.) MI6 was reportedly (at the time)
bent out of shape over the Americans squandering the “asset” (the
infiltrator) in order to score PR points with the U.S. public
(anonymously of course) by boasting of their exploit. Just as “drug
war” “warriors” like to parade the grass and drugs they seize
in front of the media in order to keep the “war” going, U.S.
“terror” warriors need to make it look like they're “winning”
their war too.

Isuspect the “leak
investigation” was undertaken at least in part to mollify the
British.

The part of Holder's bleating that is
clearly false is the “American lives were endangered” part. All
that happened was that their mole became useless and had to be
relocated with his family with new identities, and with a fat payoff
of course. If anything, you can say that the “leak” protected
lives, namely the life of the infiltrator, and possibly his family
and friends, because they were going to put him backinside
Al-Qaeda after he'd pretended to be a willing suicide bomber
and stole one of their bombs. No doubt Al-Qaeda would have gotten
suspicious of the guy.

Holder is the same guy who says that
his boss, Obama, can secretly order executions because dueprocess does not mean judicial process, an utterly absurd,
Alice In Wonderland type statement. The very concept of due process
is that an accused is notified of charges or allegations and has the
chance to contest them before penalties are imposed. The accused can
also contest the punishment. Due process evolved in opposition to the
arbitrary and capricious whims of Kings who could do whatever they
wanted without challenge and without having to justify their actions.
The point of due process is to restrict the power of the state (those
in power) to punish people, even kill them, without having to prove
just cause. Secretly ordering someone's execution is the diametrical
opposite of due process.

Just as John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and
Jay Bybee, among others, wrote legal opinions for their master, Bush
II, as if they could make law themselves, so Eric Holder has
arrogated to himself the power to make his own binding Constitutional
interpretations. (“The Constitution guarantees due process, not
judicial process,” he said in his infamous speech declaring that a
secret kill list constitutes due process for those condemned to
death.)

When the public rumblings of unease
over this self-authorized murder program reached a certain noise
level, Obama and Holder caused to be planted all kinds of stories in
the media about how carefully the faceless Imperialist apparatchiks
who add names to the death list do the vetting. [And eventually
Holder gave his chilling speech in March 2012, at a law school. More
and more, U.S. law is coming to resemble the law of the Third Reich.
I pity the fools who voted for Obama thinking he'd reverse that trend
which began under Bush II.] We're told that King Obama personally
approves or disapproves of each one he secretly sentences to death.
Well that's awfully reassuring!

Of course, no one can challenge the
alleged “intelligence information” that is the basis for the King
ordering death sentences. The whole point of courts is to allow the
accused to defend themselves.

Say that, and they pull another bit of
flimflam. This is war, they say. So why the prattle about
“what we do in secret is due process,” and “we're very careful
about who we kill”? (And what about the hundreds of civilians
killed in Pakistan and Yemen, for example? And why did you blow the
16 year old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki and his friends into pieces sitting
in a restaurant? Never mind, I guess the answer is “classified,”
i.e. a secret.)

They disingenuously skip back and forth
between a “legal” paradigm and a “war” paradigm, depending on
what sophistry works best for them politically at a given moment. The
Bush regime did the same.

Obama frequently pulls cynical stunts
like the one he's pulling now with his “media shield” law. He
also has a habit of totally mendacious public rhetoric, as in his
blather about “transparency.” He runs a hyper-secretive regime,
worse than the Bushes, Reagan, even Nixon. Under Obama, the number of
documents classified yearly has skyrocketed. In his first year in office (2009), Obama doubled the number of classifications, to almost 55 million. Bush in his last year classified over 23 million. And Bush was no slouch himself. As you can see from this chart, the number has been rising inexorably, from under 6 million in 1996. So under Obama there's been about a nine fold increase since then. Incredible. At the same time, the number declassified- what they'll allow us to see, if we can find them, in the National Archives, has been shriveling over time. [See CHARTS here.]

Another example of how what Obama tells us
“marks,” as con men call their victims, the opposite of what he
does: He breaks new records every year for deporting people,
while posing as a friend of immigrants.

It would fill a book to list all the
particulars of his two-faced deceits. Just compare his mendacious
campaign promises, especially in2008, with his actions as President.

One classic example bears repeating,
since the corporate media has thrown it down the memory hole.

Back in 2008, when he was first running
for President, Obama promised to filibuster a bill pending in
Congress to grant immunity from private lawsuits for the telecom
companies that cooperated with an illegal NSA eavesdropping program
that collected all the phone calls, emails, faxes, and texts that
passed through the telecoms networks. [3]

Well,
he didn't filibuster it. In fact, he didn't even vote against
it. He hurried back from the campaign trail to vote for
it. Who could vote for a sleazy con man like that, a totally
untrustworthy liar who is hostile to human rights? They wouldn't even
let people sue
the phone companies at the victims' own expense. (The Federal courts
had already declared that the NSA had sovereign immunity to do
whatever it wants with complete impunity, so the government
couldn't be sued.)

So no
one should be surprised by Obama's further depredations on human
rights and civil liberties as President. Except maybe by his personal
assassination program. Probably no one guessed he'd go that
far- the guy who promised to close Guantanamo Bay- and within a year!
(Oops!)

There
is much more to say about the assault on the AP, in context of
attacks on the media (including actual military attacks, as the
bombings of Aljazeera) and the American establishment media's
complacency and assumption of privilege for
itself. I will take all that up in further essays.

1] The AP is more important
than most people realize. A so-called “news service,” it
provides news stories to other media organizations that subscribe to
its services. (Originally the stories were delivered by telegraph,
for speed, hence the term “wire service.”) Probably all the major
U.S. news organizations use its stories, as do some news companies in
other countries. Its subscribers aren't obligated to use its stories,
they can pick and choose which ones to run, which they do.

In recent years the AP has covered a
number of revealing stories that don't reflect well on the U.S.
Government. These stories would otherwise have not become known.
There is good reason to suspect this motivated the Obama regime to
surreptitiously attack AP.

2] For those unfamiliar with
the structure of the U.S. Government, especially my readers outside
the U.S., the Attorney General is head of the Department of
“Justice.” “Justice” enforces- selectively and sometimes
quite arbitrarily- Federal criminal and civil laws. It also carries
out persecutions of political targets, using various laws as weapons
against its victims. The Obama regime has been zealous in criminally
persecuting whistle-blowers and alleged leakers, for example. The FBI
(Federal Bureau of Investigation), the major Federal secret police
agency that has a domestic purview, although it does and has
long operated overseas also, is part of “Justice.” However in
practice it operates as an independent fiefdom most of the time. (An
Agency is an organizational unit that is part of a Department)

Heads of Departments are dubbed Cabinet
Secretaries. The Cabinet is the level of authority in the Federal
Government below the President and Vice President. Another example of
a Department is the Department of “Defense” (which was more
honestly named the Department of War prior to 1949, when in a Cold
War propaganda move it was renamed).

However, authority and power
aren't necessarily the same
thing in the U.S. Government. In recent decades, real power has been
increasingly concentrated in the White House (the President's
official headquarters), whose staff frequently gives orders to the
Cabinet Secretaries in the name of the President. This has given rise
to the phrase “Imperial Presidency,” among people who find this
concentration of power ominous. (“Power tends to corrupt, and
absolute power corrupts absolutely,”-Lord Acton's famous aphorism,
not an original idea with him, but well put.)

Another
example: sometimes the President's so-called “national security
adviser,” controls foreign policy, not the Secretary of State
(“Foreign Minister” in most countries), as happened during the
Nixon regime, when Henry Kissinger, a notorious serial mass murderer,
was the “adviser” (chief henchman of foreign crimes) before he
officially took over
the State Department as Secretary of State.

3]
NSA: National Security
Agency, a Pentagon agency that is a gigantic global spying agency
that collects all the electronic, radio, and other communications it
can in the entire world. It even tapped an undersea military
communications cable of the Soviet Union- a Navy submarine placed a
special device on the cable.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Much of the bad reportage of the U.S. media seems to stem from its hunger to play foreign policy games instead of reporting news.

For example, Syria keeps attacking NATO ally Turkey. The evil Assad regime has shelled Turkish villages (killing Turkish citizens), shot down Turkish fighter jets over the Mediterranean sea, and set off terrorist car bombs in Turkey, at a border crossing and just a few days ago in the city of Reyhanli, which killed scores of people and devastated the town.

NATO is allegedly a collective defense alliance. When a member nation is attacked, the other members are supposed to intervene on their side. Of course, that's crap. In reality, NATO is nothing but a tool of U.S. Imperialism. The lackey member nations get to feel like the U.S. will protect them. That may or may not be the case, depending on how the managers of the U.S. Empire perceive U.S. "interests" in the particular situation.

NATO is used by the U.S. as a vehicle for pursing its own policies, with subordinate NATO members dragged along to help carry the load.

As the U.S. has made clear it has no intention of intervening in the rebellion in Syria, that means NATO is going to continue to ignore Syrian aggression and terrorism against Turkey.

Hence, the U.S. media downplays Syria's crimes. The media doesn't want the public wondering why the U.S. is doing nothing in one situation, while claiming it has to attack other nations, nations that aren't attacking a NATO ally, a nation like, say, ohhh, IRAN.

So dual car bombings in Reyhanli, Turkey, that killed at least fourteen times as many people as were killed in the Boston Marathon "terrorist" bombings, are not recognized as terrorist in the U.S. media. Because terrorism is the new communism, the blackest evil that must be fought anywhere and everywhere.

See the link above for detailed examples and discussion.

[By the way, I'm often asked, "Is there an easy way to find out when there are new essays on your website, without having to go there and check?"

Why yes, there is! You can enter your email address in the little box on the upper right of the page and click the "Submit" button. Then you'll be notified by email when there's something new.

"Why that's fantastic!" I hear you saying. Well, not literally. I imagine you thinking it. Although you could be saying that out loud. But I can't hear you, of course. You've not within earshot of me. I could imagine you
saying it aloud, however. Or perhaps you're saying something else, or
not saying anything at all. I'm not going to sit here and try to imagine every possible thing you may be thinking or saying at this moment, ok? No offense.

You might not be talking at all. Who knows? Maybe you're eating and your mouth is full
of food. But perhaps the news about email alerts was so stunning that you exclaimed "THAT'SFANTASTIC!" when your mouth was
full of food and spewed it all over your computer screen. If that's the
case, I'm willing to take partial responsibility and apologize. But just
for my share of the responsibility. You'll have to apologize to
yourself for the rest.

Of course, maybe you're here a lot already. You may be catching up on the many postings from the past that are still valid today and have much to teach. You can expand the entries by clicking on those little triangles by the dates in the right hand column, or search by words in the search function for topics of interest in the little search box on the upper left corner with the orange B next to it. In that case I owe you another apology for wasting your time with all this chatter about email updates.

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

California has long been a leader in
pioneering new methods of police state repression. The Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD) in particular has long spearheaded the drive
to put police in control of society. Over the years its infamous
chiefs, such as Parker and Gates, have been driven by ideological
fanaticism.

Now NPR reports (Morning Edition,
5/7/13) that the ACLU is suing just to get access to a sample of a
license plate data base the LAPD has assembling. In a secretive mass
surveillance program, the LAPD has been surreptitiously recording the
license plates of all cars driving down the street and creating a
searchable database. Of course the LAPD refuses to talk about it-
their excuse now is the standard “cannot comment because it's the
subject of a lawsuit.” There's no law or rule that prevents
government agencies from talking about a topic because they're being
sued. For a private individual, it may be wise to refrain from
comment, especially if they're being criminally charged. But
governments and their arms should have to explain themselves.

For some insight into the nefarious
political repression activities of the LAPD, you could start by
reading the book The Glass House Tapes, an account by Louis E.
Tackwood of his experiences as an agent provocateur and infiltrator
of black and leftist groups for the “intelligence” division of
that Department. [Amazon.com has it.] He also describes various
operations he learned of. (Of course the LAPD secret police unit
works closely with the FBI in particular, as well as other police
state agencies including the CIA, which is “banned” from domestic
operations. HAH. Funny joke the establishment made when they created
the CIA.)

Speaking of California police state
operations, a few decades ago there was an FBI-run right-wing
terrorist organization in San Diego called the Secret Army
Organization. Apparently this was used to intimidate people seen as
leftists, and maybe as an assassination unit. Anyway, one fine
evening an undercover FBI agent and an SAO terrorist were stalking a
“left-wing” college professor, and they were in their car outside
his house. The terrorist shot at a woman he saw inside, hitting her
in the elbow and crippling her permanently. That created a smallish
problem for the FBI. But not to worry. The U.$ media always has the
back of the secret police. And why not? The secret police are there
to serve and protect the corporate oligarchy. “The” media is the
mouthpiece, the propaganda organs, of that same corporate oligarchy.
So basically they are on the same side, if occasionally there are
minor conflicts or tactical differences between them. There can also
be criticisms of the competence of the secret police (or of the
media) in how they carry out their jobs. But no fundamental
critiques, and certainly no calls for real accountability- for
example criminal prosecutions for crimes committed by secret
policemen, (In best Orwellian fashion, referred to as “law
enforcement officers” in the case of the FBI and similar agencies.
The CIA, a global mega-terrorist outfit, is called an “intelligence”
or “spy” organization.)

Since the corporate media is a
hegemonic system of consciousness-control in America, as long as they
have the backs of the secret police, the secret police can persecute
progressives with impunity. Leftists are either ignored or reviled
and smeared by the corporate media. The crimes against them either go
unreported or are treated as insignificant.

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Monday, May 06, 2013

Here's Barack Obama after being forced
to concede that Syrian tyrant Bashar al-Assad probably used chemical
weapons against people in Syria:

“And what we now have is evidence
that chemical weapons have been used inside of Syria, but we don't
know how they were used, when they were used, who used them. We
don't have a chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened.
” [Press conference, 4/30/13, WH transcript.]

That sounds like objections Assad's
defense lawyer would make, if Assad were on trial.

Obama isn't talking about “red lines”
anymore. Now it's “game changers.” Specifically, IF he could
REALLY REALLY prove Assad did it, and did it A LOT, why, then he'd
reexamine his options.

Furthermore, "For the Syrian
government to utilize chemical weapons on its people crosses a line
that will change my calculus and how the United States approaches
these issues," Obama said April 26th.

Uh-oh, his calculus might change! And
that's not all...

"I've meant what I said."

So watch out, Assad!

Of course, it isn't irrational for
Obama to try and avoid getting sucked into Syria. The problem is he
was bluffing about that “red line,” and Assad is calling him on
it.

And of course, the U.S. is constantly
being exposed as insincere when its fine rhetoric about human rights
and freedom and democracy and blah blah runs smack up against the
reality of its actions, actions that reveal that it is just another
power mad, greedy empire, ruled by ruthless, selfish politicians (who
in the case of the U.S., do the bidding of an elite class of
super-rich people).

More fundamentally, in a normal human
world, people wouldn't be living under tyrants like Assad. There
wouldn't be horrible torture-murder regimes like that. And if there
were, other nations would fight to free the people oppressed under
those regimes, especially when they rebel against their oppressors.

That all sounds so utopian, doesn't it?
The fact that it does starkly reveals how how far we are from
existing on a human level in this world.